Tickets to attend an event, such as a concert or a sports event, are of transitory value. Like rights to attend any expiring event, once the event has been completed, the tickets are relatively worthless. Subscription tickets, for example season tickets, have a relatively high rate of non-attendance and hence a lot of the value of the tickets is wasted. Issues surrounding ticket utilization, or lack thereof, fall into two general categories, which might best be described as concerns of ticket-holders and concerns of potential ticket buyers.
Ticket Holder Concerns
Many individuals purchase tickets far in advance in order to guarantee seating at events. Ticket purchases may be for individual events or for groups of events such as seasonal passes. Advance ticket purchases are made knowing full well that a certain percentage of events will not be attended for circumstances unknown at the time of the purchase. While there might be some guilt associated with allowing some subset of season tickets to go unused, because the seasonal ticket cost is “sunk” (unrecoverable) the rational ticket holder makes their decision to attend a game based upon the value of attending that game versus the opportunity cost of attending the game; the decision is not based solely on the price paid for the ticket, but by considering all present options that might not have been contemplated at the time the ticket was purchased.
However, not all decision making is rational. In fact, many individuals do weigh the “sunk” ticket cost into their decision-making process; as a result many ticket-holders thus attend a number of games which they are not really interested in attending, or which should not be attended because the opportunity cost is greater than the value of attendance. This attendance may not be an efficient use of their time—however, it happens anyhow. For these individuals, a means for assuaging the economic guilt of abandoning ticket costs would change the calculus involved in deciding to attend or not, allowing them greater latitude in attending certain games and not others.
In general, there exists four groups, or types, of ticket holders:                Those that know they will attend an event for which they hold a ticket.        Those that know they won't attend an event for which they hold a ticket.        Those that don't know whether they will attend an event for which they hold a ticket, but are likely to make a decision at the last-minute.        Those that could be swayed to either attend or not attend an event depending on whether they received financial compensation for a ticket.Ticket Buyers Issues        
Counter-balancing ticket holders and their willingness to part with tickets are individuals that, for one reason or another, have not been able to secure tickets to a desired event but wish to attend. They may not have been able to purchase a ticket before supply ran out, may not have known of the event in time to purchase tickets, may not have been willing or able to pay the ticket price, or didn't know they wanted to attend an event until very near to the start of the event. This group includes an enormous amount of people, including the most price sensitive—for whom tickets are too expensive—and the most price insensitive—for whom the cost of tickets is no issue. These individuals desire tickets and are willing to pay a price in order to secure them, though within this class of ticket acquirers, there is enormous variability in willingness and ability to pay.
There is thus seen to be a highly inefficient market for unused season ticket rights. Some tickets go to waste. Some individuals attend games when there are other places they'd rather be. Concomitantly, there exist individuals that would like to get tickets but can't. These individuals want to attend an event and may be willing to pay a price that would satisfy the demands of ticket holders wishing to sell their tickets. Further, certain individuals might be willing to pay a price that would satisfy the demands of ticket holders that are not actively looking to sell their tickets, but are willing to consider an offer.
The present inventors have determined that there is no easy means of brokering an agreement between ticket holders and ticket buyers. This is particularly true with respect to last-minute ticket transactions. As a result, many tickets go to waste.
Considering now previous attempts at solving these problems. Perhaps the oldest means of disposing of excess ticket inventory, and in some ways still the most effective, is scalping. Scalpers show up at an event and look for individuals that need tickets. Scalping suffers from the enormous problems of often times being illegal, feeling uncomfortable for the participating parties and requiring a physical presence at a venue. Scalping is a popular but troublesome solution to the problem of disposing of unused tickets.
One favorite means of quickly disposing of unused tickets is to simply give them away. Gifting typically involves last minute calls to friends, or sometimes mass emails to co-workers. The tickets are generally offered for free, and often result in successfully finding and satisfying an interested party that will attend the event if they don't have to pay for the tickets. Of course, there are undoubtedly people outside of the seller's immediate contact list that would be willing to pay for the ticket, but there is no reliable way of identifying them in a typical gifting situation. This solution does nothing to assuage the sunk-cost guilt suffered by ticket holders who cannot find takers and who thus still feel remorse at the financial loss of unused tickets or obligation to go to games they might not really want to attend.
Another option for disposing of tickets is to sell them in an online market, for example through Craigslist.org. This type of commerce is generally anonymous and easy. However, it requires that a ticket holder know in advance that they don't plan to attend a ticketed event. There is also a lot of administrative follow up. Individuals still have to mail or deliver the tickets, arrange payment, etc.
Online auctions are available through which many individuals sell many types of products and services, including tickets. See, for example, the famous Internet auction website www.ebay.com. As with other types of online markets, to auction a ticket a seller must know in advance that he wishes to make a binding sale. As with the online sales described above, options are generally not conducive to last minute, easy sales.
The Internet Web site Stubhub.com is an online ticket transaction system that facilitates sales between private buyers and sellers. Stubhub.com does not solve the above-described problems of on-the-fence sellers. All of the sellers that list tickets on Stubhub.com are active sellers that create an information profile for a ticket(s) they know in advance that they want to sell. The Web site functions like a specialized auction site for tickets.
Priceline.com is another online commerce system, wherein buyers name their own price for products and services, the system attempting to fill the buyer demand with available supply. However, priceline.com is generally set up to accommodate institutional sellers of quantity, expiring value products such as airline tickets. Priceline.com is generally not conducive to accommodating the needs of individual sellers.
The present inventors have recognized the need for methods and systems that enable subscription rights holders, such as season ticket holders, to flexibly and easily set criteria under which they will consider offers for and may sell unwanted tickets, while simultaneously enabling potential buyers access to a large inventory of otherwise unavailable products.